Northern California

Broader geographic and economic zone extending from the San Francisco Bay Area north to the Oregon border and east into the Sacramento Valley, within which the Emerald Triangle is the recognized center but not the sole producing area. It encompasses Sonoma and Lake counties (hill-country outdoor cultivation and, later, licensed farms), Santa Cruz County (home of the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana founded by Valerie and Mike Corral, and a key Prop 215 constituency), Sacramento and adjacent delta counties (indoor and greenhouse production), and portions of Napa, Solano, Yolo, Butte, Shasta, and Tehama. The region's cannabis character was shaped by confluent forces: Bay Area counterculture and LGBTQ activism (producing the buyers' clubs and the Prop 215 coalition); the back-to-the-land migration into the North Coast; Mediterranean-climate outdoor agronomy favorable to Cannabis sativa; proximity to major urban markets in San Francisco, Oakland, and Sacramento; and displacement effects as CAMP enforcement in the Triangle pushed growers into neighboring counties from the mid-1980s. Following Prop 215 (1996) the region became the center of the U.S. medical-cannabis economy; under Prop 64 (2016) it became the principal — and most oversupplied — licensed adult-use production zone in the country.